So Luton Town got promoted to the EPL this season. Great story! 10 years ago they were in the fifth tier, so it’s like a team from a Northern American local beer league working its way up to the majors.
When a team is promoted to the EPL, how many of them will actually get to continue with the team? I’ve read about shedding players when a team is relegated, but I’m curious what happens in the other direction.
It can vary quite a bit. Some teams keep most of their roster with a few add-ons while others, like Nottingham Forest last year, will basically build a whole new squad - they signed well over a dozen new players.
It also depends on if the promoted side were recently in the PL (so may have a number of players at that level already) and if they moved up by winning the championship (indicated a pretty high team quality level) or via the playoffs (maybe not quite so prepared for the PL).
Interesting! Thank you.
It’s kind of a philosophy thing for the people running the club. If they have a football project going on that they believe in, and especially if they trust what the manager is building, they’re more likely to add fewer players, but of a higher caliber. But that requires pretty cold hard calculus about how good what they have is. Some directors/owners/managers will have an extremely itchy finger on the “buy a bunch of 32 year olds, hire a 210 year old manager, try to win five 1-0s and stay up” button.
Leicester when they came up was an example of a team that didn’t make massive changes (not so much the trust in the manager though). They started their first Premier League match with basically the same team they won the Championship with, just plus a couple impact strikers and more depth. In that case they obviously had good reason to believe they were showing up on day 1 with Premier League quality players. They made more dramatic moves after their first season staying up, not before. Leeds is another good example. They spent money when they came up and added very high level attackers, but the names in the lineup for their first Premier League match (when they almost got something from Liverpool) were recognizably the same team from the previous season.
Like @Jas09 said, Nottingham Forest clearly didn’t think they had a viable Premier League team, so they bought a lot of (individually less splashy) younger players and turned over their first team pretty thoroughly. From a quick scan it looks like of the 11 players who had the most appearances for them, only 3 were holdovers. Fulham were a little less aggressive and kept ~7 of the first team.
I don’t know enough about Luton Town to say definitively, but from what I do know about them I think they’re probably on the side of maintaining the core identity of the team.
Excellent answer, to which I’ll just add:
Rumour has it that Luton are going to have spend several million to bring their stadium up to Premier League standards, which may limit their room manoeuvre in the transfer market.
Thank you for the further insights!
I’m a PL noob, having just started to support Leeds United the season before this past one. So it was interesting to hear the approach Leeds had taken when they came up. And then the ass fell out of 'er.
Oh boy, talk about self-inflicted pain. You could have chosen Man City you know!
Hah! Yes! Daughter lived in Leeds for a bit, and told me about the angst associated with the side being mired in the Championship. Ted Lasso motivated me to check out where they were on the table. It was right near the end of El Loco Bielsa era. But I’m hooked, strangely!
The sine qua non of a great player is that they make the players around them better - probably in most sports but definitely in football. Put Kevin de Bruyne in Luton Town’s midfield and suddenly everyone is playing up a level - more time, more opportunity, more chances.
Luton aren’t about to sign anyone close to KDB’s level but the principle is that 2 or 3 astute signings can be transformative - the astute bit is the hard part.
You’ve also got considerations that no amount of player influence can really improve a sub-standard goalkeeper, for example. Or a striker who doesn’t know how to find the net - chances are at a premium in the prem even for the strongest teams.
What is the situation with respect to stadiums? Does a team often, or ever, seek a new venue as a result of moving up or down?
Rule of thumb; half the starting XI need improving
Teams very very rarely up sticks and move to a new stadium - their fanbase is usually very local and there’s often a lot of history embedded in the stadium itself. Plus it takes years in the planning to find or build a new stadium. So, if anything, they are more likely to develop the existing stadium to increase its capacity. A move happens occasionally - West Ham moved into the London Olympic Stadium, but not without controversy and recreational outrage from the fanbase, and it was years in the planning.
To play in the Premier League, stadiums have to meet certain design criteria (minimum 5000 capacity, with 2000 seated), but this isn’t very onerous. Luton is apparently the smallest ground to ever be in the Premiership, so they’ll be spending £8-10 million to get it up to scratch (mainly press facilities and corporate boxes, from what I can see). Their capacity is c.10,000 - compare that to Man Utd’s stadium at c.75,000.
Has a topic been started for the 2023-24 EPL season?
Moving stadiums (and towns) almost killed the MK Dons.